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Cancel Culture Places Australia at a Political Turning Point

As a nation, do we believe in robust political debate? Or are we leaning towards the more suppressive model coming out of Communist China?

An Australian speaking tour by Donald Trump Junior was ended before it began. The former US president’s son had his visa delayed and it was only in the last 24 hours before he was due to board his flight that it was granted. The tour has been rescheduled for later this year.

British broadcaster and former politician, Nigel Farage, who was expected to tour with Donald Trump Junior has been going through his own brush with cancel culture in the form of debanking. The former Member of European parliament says that Coutts Bank (NatWest) decided to close his accounts because it didn’t like his political views.

We should be celebrating political diversity with some of the biggest names in international politics. It’s a chance for friend and foe to compete in debate, a practice that dates back to the world’s first known democratic societies in Ancient Greece.

It seems extraordinary that an Australian minister would intervene to prevent the visit of the son of a former US president, if that’s what really happened.

It’s easy to see the misuse of this discretionary power when you look at the performance of previous governments who have vetoed the visas of speakers, sports stars and political individuals who are known to hold views contrary to whatever the prevailing dogma is at the time.

Canceling the son of a former president is an undiplomatic act that could easily come back to bite those responsible.

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Free Media dead in Australia

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As Government becomes more and more powerful, anyone who challenges the current policies is smeared and censored. The legacy media happily parrots the propaganda, afraid of losing government funding.

Transcript

This parliament’s descent into a one-party state could not have happened without the media’s complicity. The cancelling of Jessica Rowe’s interview with Senator Pauline Hanson is the latest manifestation of a power structure that George Orwell gave these words to in 1941 following a failed attempt to publish his seminal work Animal Farm: ‘The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics by employing veiled censorship. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.’

In 80 years, nothing has changed. Media and multinationals have the same wealthy owners who use their power to corral thought and enrich themselves. Orwell’s Animal Farm is a metaphor: animals overthrew their farmer to create a fairer society—only for that power to corrupt, leading to less freedom, with the pigs assuming the role of dictators. Ironically, not only are the media acting like the pigs in Animal Farm; the book has been wiped from our curriculum for the crime of making children think about the power paradigm. Our media are not some noble fifth estate; the media are a fourth column, advancing their billionaire owners’ interests at the expense of truth and integrity.

The only solution to the problem of media propaganda is introducing competition, removing federal support for commercial media and expanding the market through a ballot of spare spectrum open to only new media organisations. Instead of the media being protected under the power of their oligopolies, let the media earn their survival on the worth of their coverage. Instead of conflicted journalists promoting the orthodoxy, our community and our nation must have honest, independent journalists who challenge the orthodoxy. We have one flag, we are one community, we are one nation and we want our human rights and freedom restored.

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